Abstract: An American paintings
conservator trained in Berlin, William Suhr worked under Wilhelm Reinhold
Valentiner at the Detroit Institute of Arts beginning in 1927, and was the conservator of the Frick Collection from 1935
to 1977. He also maintained private clients including individuals and major American museums in Cleveland,
New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Louis. After World War II he
worked closely with clients active in the New York art market, particularly the
dealer Rosenberg and Stiebel. The bulk of the collection is comprised of
photographs of paintings treated by Suhr, along with his treatment notes. The
collection also contains business papers, including correspondence, articles
about Suhr, personal papers, and documentation of Suhr's own artwork.

The conservation photographs, treatment reports and negatives were
acquired in 1987. Further papers were acquired in 1990 and 2005. Several persons
processed this collection over the years. Copy negatives have been made to
preserve the information on deteriorating original negatives. Research
photographs (which the collection contained in addition to photographs
documenting Suhr's conservation) were interfiled into the Paintings Core
Collection of the Photo Study Collection. Some conservation photographs that
had been interfiled into the Paintings Core Collection were re-integrated into
the archival collection in 2005-2006 by Jan Bender. Final processing of the
collection was completed by Martha Steele and Jan Bender in 2005-2006.

Separated Material

Barnes, Albert C.,
The art in painting (1925), transferred to the Getty Research
Library.

Related Material

Research photographs of paintings from the William Suhr papers are
conserved in the Paintings Core Collection of the Photo Study Collection of the
Getty Research Institute.

Suhr's treatment reports for paintings restored for the Frick
Collection are held by the Frick Collection.

An oral biography of William Suhr is conserved in the Foundation of
the American Institute for Conservation (FAIC) Archive, housed at the
Winterthur Museum (see also box C1 for a copy of the audio tape and box 123,
folder 4-5 for a transcript of this interview).

William Suhr letters 1927-1959, located at the Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Biographical/Historical Note

William Suhr was born in Kreutzberg, Germany on March 31, 1896. His parents were U.S. citizens; his paternal grandfather
had emmigrated to the
United States from Germany in 1850. During his twenties Suhr's father went to
Vienna seeking treatment for incipient deafness and to pursue his acting
career. When he became completely deaf he gave up acting and stayed on in
Germany. As a youth, Suhr acted in the same theatrical company as his mother.
When he showed artistic promise as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a stonemason for
three years. He then studied painting at the Royal Art Academy in Berlin. It
was in Berlin, at the age of 20, that he met the art historian Max Deri, who
introduced him to the restoration of painting. At that time there were no
schools for restoration; it was a family business and methods were kept secret.
Deri gave Suhr a panel to restore along with some advice on how to do it. Soon
Suhr was very active as a restorer in Berlin, where the art historian Wilhelm
Reinhold Valentiner noticed him in the early 1920’s. Valentiner became Director
of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1924. In 1927 Suhr accepted his offer of the job of restorer
of paintings. The letter with this offer is in the archive.

During the Great Depression, the Detroit Institute of Arts closed
temporarily. During this time the staff was dispersed and Walter Heil, Curator
of European Art, took the position of Director of the M. H. de Young Memorial
Museum in San Francisco in 1933. His association with Heil took Suhr to San
Francisco, which he liked very much. In addition to his restoration work on
panel paintings in San Francisco, Suhr worked on the Brangwyn murals at the
Veterans' Auditorium. In 1936 he also taught a summer course at Mills College
titled The Technique, Restoration and Preservation of Paintings, where he met and befriended the artist Lyonel Feininger.

By the early 1930’s Suhr’s expertise in the technique of canvas and
panel transfers was sought internationally. This was an especially important
treatment in the time before it was possible to stabilize temperature and
humidity in buildings. In 1933 Suhr established his studio in New York. In
1935, Mortimer Clapp, director of the Frick Collection, asked Suhr to become
the permanent conservator. He also conserved paintings for art institutions in
Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Saint Louis, San Francisco,
and Toledo, and for private collectors and for the art trade. In 1939, Suhr was
a conservation consultant for “Masterpieces of Art,” shown at the New York
World’s Fair. Later in his carreer he worked extensively on 18th century
American paintings for the Kennedy Galleries in New York.

Suhr came to painting conservation at a pivotal time, when there were
great paintings on the market and before museums had their own trained
conservationists. Some of the notable paintings that Suhr worked on in the
course of his career include
St. George by Mantegna (Galleria dell’Accademia), which
Suhr saved from severe blistering during the exhibition
Masterpieces of Italian Art lent by the Royal Italian
Government November 18, 1939 to January 9, 1940
, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and which he considered one of the great
restorations of his career;
St. Jerome in his Study, now attributed to the Jan van Eyck
workshop (Detroit Institute of Arts), which was reattributed to Jan van Eyck when Suhr found that the portions thought
to be by a second artist
(Petrus Christus) had been overpainted;
The Polish Rider by Rembrandt (Frick
Collection), of which the bottom four inches that had been destroyed by fire and
clumsily repainted were repainted by Suhr, bringing the horse's hooves
back into perspective; and the
Annunciation Triptych (or
Merode Altarpiece) by Robert Campin (Cloisters Museum), which is perhaps the most important painting that Suhr worked on.
Particularly noted for his work on Rembrandt paintings, Suhr was said to have held more
Rembrandts in his hands than anyone since Rembrandt.

As Suhr states in “The Restoration of the Merode Altarpiece,”
published in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, his work was guided by
the belief that “[r]estorations should preserve the original and attenuate losses
in a manner that will permit the observer’s eye to pass over gaps in the paint
film without distress.”

Suhr was a traveler and mountain climber. He traveled in Europe,
North Africa, and North America. He and his wife, Henriette Suhr, created an
extensive garden on thirteen acres at their home, Rocky Hills, in Mt. Kisco, New York,
which will be open to the public in the future. He was also a painter, working
mostly in watercolor, in the course of his travels.

Biographical writings about Suhr can be found in the archive.

Scope and Content of the Collection

This collection provides comprehensive documentation of Suhr’s
achievements and activities as a painting conservator. The first series,
conservation photographs and treatment notes, documents Suhr's work from 1927,
when he came to the United States as conservator for the Detroit Institute of
Arts, to the end of his career when he closed his New York studio in 1977. The
materials consist of photographs taken of the paintings, often before and after
treatment, and treatment notes written by Suhr. Negatives for much of the
photography are also part of this series.

There is ample further documention of Suhr's restoration activity in
the correspondence files in the business papers series. In addition, account
ledgers, goods received receipts, date books, photograph logs and Suhr’s
address book all provide further insight into Suhr’s studio practices. The
extensive Kennedy Gallery memorandi document Suhr’s work for an important
gallery of American painting. Photographs of Suhr’s studios and professional
associates provide further documentation of his career. And the printed materials
series provides a record of published articles about Suhr and his work.

Personal papers provide information about Suhr’s family, his efforts
to formalize his immigration status in the United States, and his activities
during World War II. Having grown up in Germany, the child of American parents, Suhr understood the extreme dangers of
the time and wrote letters to United States government officials to inform them about what was happening in Germany during
the war. He also tried to help several Germans
immigrate to the United States. This series also documents some of Suhr's
travels. A final series documents Suhr’s activity as a painter and designer
with inventories, photographs and transparencies.

The conservation photographs and treatment notes are fairly
comprehensive. The other portions of the collection are representative but not
complete.

Suhr can be seen and heard in a public relations film made for the
Detroit Institute of Arts and a tape-recorded interview conducted in 1977.